Hamilton’s Singapore charge ends in smoke as Ferrari gamble unravels late
For 15 laps it looked like classic Hamilton: a late call, fresh rubber, clean air, and a red car ripping through Marina Bay time like it had a dinner reservation. Then, with the Mercedes finally in sight, the front brakes cried enough. What started as a clever Ferrari play became a survival run to the flag.
Hamilton lined up sixth after a muted qualifying and immediately found himself on the back foot. Charles Leclerc got the jump off the line and swept past both his teammate and an equally sluggish Kimi Antonelli. From there, the first stint told an uncomfortable truth: on the medium tyre, Hamilton never really had the car under him. Across 25 laps he averaged just under three-tenths slower than Antonelli, and with Singapore’s narrow margins and brutal tyre sensitivities, that was more than enough to lock the order in place through the first round of stops.
So Ferrari reached for the only lever left. With Liam Lawson almost 50 seconds behind Hamilton, the pit wall had a safety net. They boxed him on lap 46 for softs, banking on clear track and raw pace to sling him back into the fight. It worked, immediately. For a dozen laps Hamilton was the quickest car in that mini-battle by almost two seconds a tour, scything a 23-second gap to Antonelli down to 1.6 in just 11 laps.
Complication: while Hamilton was hunting, Antonelli pulled a neat move on Leclerc into Turn 16, flipping that intra-pack dynamic. Ferrari responded and swapped their cars on lap 56 to free Hamilton for the kill.
And here’s where the physics bites. Up to the stop, Hamilton had been doing the unglamorous stuff—lifting a fraction earlier, rolling off throttle into heavy braking zones, the lift-and-coast that keeps tyre and brake temps happy in Singapore’s swampy air. On the softs, with a target ahead and the stopwatch loving him, he ditched the margin. Brake temperatures, already living on the edge, edged higher. Then he plunged into Antonelli’s wake and the airflow that had been cooling those discs evaporated. Four laps later, barreling toward that same Turn 16, the front brake let go.
From chasing P5 to clinging onto anything, the race flipped in a heartbeat. Hamilton initially managed the issue well enough to only shed 4.5 seconds to Fernando Alonso, then the bottom fell out. On the penultimate lap he bled a staggering 32.5 seconds, and by the final tour Alonso was within 16 seconds and closing like a freight train. Hamilton wrestled the car around one last time, held track position on the road for P7, and parked up looking like a man who’d just made a very long night even longer.
Post-race, the stewards added a five-second penalty for repeated track limits breaches and that on-the-road seventh became eighth, with Alonso promoted. The sting? Without the failure, fifth was on. The numbers don’t lie: Hamilton’s soft-tyre pace advantage over Antonelli was more than enough to seal the move had the brakes stayed in the game.
Was Ferrari wrong to roll the dice? No. The window was there, the tyre was the right one, and the car in that phase was properly quick. That it came apart in the dirty air of a car he was about to pass only underscores how thin the margin is in Singapore. It’s a heat-management race disguised as a street fight, and sometimes the street wins.
Big picture, the lost haul is annoying rather than catastrophic for Hamilton’s own tally, but the constructors’ fight is getting increasingly feisty. Ferrari sit third in the standings, and Mercedes’ recent form has turned that into a proper arm wrestle. Six extra points here or there could be the difference in prize money and development wriggle room ahead of the next rules reset. No one at Maranello will say it out loud, but this one will smart on Monday morning.
Still, stripped of the drama, there was reassurance in the raw pace. Hamilton’s late stint was as sharp as anything he’s shown this season, and the execution from the pit wall—spot the gap, commit, swap the cars—was tidy. The plan was right. The execution was good. The brakes, not so much.
On a circuit where overtakes come at a premium and track position is king, Ferrari nearly hacked the system. Nearly.
